Page:Adam's reports on vernacular education in Bengal and Behar, submitted to Government in 1835, 1836 and 1838.djvu/109

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Population.—In 1802, the Collector reported that, in the district of Nuddea, there were then 5,749 hamlets and villages supposed to contain 127,405 houses, which at six persons to a house would give 764,430 inhabitants, of which number he supposed 286,661 were Mahomedans, but, from the returns of other districts since made with increased accuracy, it is probable that the above sum total is much under the real amount. Since that date also the district appears to have received a considerable accession of territory.

Indigenous Elementary Schools.—In none of the authorities or publications to which I have the means of referring, do I find the slightest reference to indigenous elementary schools in this district, although no doubt can be entertained of the existence of such institutions in considerable numbers in this as well as in other districts of Bengal.

Elementary Schools not Indigenous.—The Missionary of the Church Missionary Society at Krishnaghur has the charge of three schools at that station and six at Nuddea. There are about 500 boys in attendance, and several of them have made considerable progress in the knowledge of the books they are reading. At the suggestion of the Missionaries of this Society, several Indigo Planters have been induced to establish schools near their factories.

Indigenous Schools of Learning.—The town of Nuddea was the capital of Hindoo principality anterior to the Mahomedan conquest, and in more recent times it has been a seat of Brahmanical learning. Hamilton remarks that, as a seat of learning, it must have apparently declined to a very obscure condition, as in 1801 the Judge and Magistrate, in reply to the Marquis Wellesley’s queries, declared that he knew not of any seminaries within the district in which either the Hindoo or Mahomedan law was then taught. This statement curiously contrasts with the following details, and affords another illustration of a remark already made, that the educational institutions of the Hindoos have sometimes been most strangely overlooked.

The celebrity of Nuddea as a school of Hindoo learning is wholly unconnected with any notion of peculiar sanctity as in the case of Benares. Its character as a university was probably connected with the political importance which belong to it about the time of the Mahomedan invasion, as it seems to have been for a time the capital of Bengal. The princes of Bengal and the latter rajahs of Nuddea endowed certain teachers with lands for the instruction and maintenance of scholars, and the support thus given to pundits and pupils attracted a number of Brahmans to settle there, and gave a reputation to the district. The loss of all political consequence and the alleged resumption of most of the